while I did other things. The process took several hours
but, at the end, it had cataloged and analyzed the contents
of all the photos. That may seem like a long time, but not
really once you consider what it gave me as a result.
Within Excire Foto I could see the thumbnails of each
photo (a mix of JPEG, TIFF, PSD, and RAW photos). Like
any good photo viewer, it also provided for the display
of embedded metadata, a histogram, and a way to nav-
igate between folders where the photos are stored. What
makes it unique is that it also included a list of AI-generated
keywords it assigned to each of the photos on this drive.
Excire Foto’s keywords fall within two broad categories:
Content and Photography. Under Content, you’ll find the
subject matter-based keywords like animals, foods, sports,
nature, etc., and under Photography, you’ll find words that
describe the contents such as bright, dark, high contrast,
colorful, and so on. You can then use these keywords to
search within Excire Foto to find the photos you want.
Aside from keywords, it can also recognize faces in
photos and provide a range of very useful parameters to
search the library when you’re trying to find just the right
photo of someone. Back to my photo book example,
I wanted to search the entire library for photos of my son
where his eyes were open and he was smiling (the Holy
Grail of kid photos!). Along with parameters for one face,
two faces, several, approximate age (baby, child, teen,
adult, elderly), you can also bias the results toward more
or less male or female, or biased toward smile or no smile.
So, with one of my son’s faces selected as the face to find,
I configured the desired parameters, set the results for a
maximum of 600, and within seconds got back over 500
smiling photos of my son. That was pretty cool. I could
see a lot of uses for that kind of search by event photog-
raphers on location.
Aside from the AI-powered content analysis, you can
also apply your own keywords, star ratings, color labels,
and flags to photos within Excire Foto. All of that, including
the automated keywords, can be written to each source
photo’s metadata, or included in an export (except flags, as
those can’t be written to XMP metadata). I took my smiling
son’s search results, applied 5-star ratings to my favorites,
then used the export function to save them as JPEGs to a
separate folder so I could test-import them into a Light-
room Classic catalog and add them to my book. After
importing them into Lightroom, I was pleased to see that
all of the keywords and star ratings had imported along
with the photos.
It is possible to send a photo from Excire Foto to a photo
editor, via the Right-click menu, in much the same way that
you can from your operating system’s file browser. This is
nice, but a bit clunky. I think that having a way to config-
ure a primary external editor that opened via a keyboard
shortcut would be ideal. You can download a free trial,
check out the minimum requirements for running on Mac
or Windows, read the FAQs, and access tutorials over at
Excire’s website. n> KELBY ONE.COM
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